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Advances in material agency driven by artificial intelligence (AI) have facilitated breakthroughs in material adaptivity enabling smart objects to autonomously provide individualized smart services, which makes smart objects act as social actors embedded in the real world. However, little is known about how material adaptivity fosters the infusion use of smart objects to maximize the value of smart services in customers' lives. This study examines the underlying mechanism of material adaptivity (task and social adaptivity) on AI infusion use, drawing on the theoretical lens of social embeddedness.

This study adopted partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM), mediating tests, path comparison tests and polynomial modeling to analyze the proposed research model and hypotheses.

The results supported the proposed research model and hypotheses, except for the hypothesis of the comparative effects on infusion use. Besides, the results of mediating tests suggested the different roles of social embeddedness in the impacts of task and social adaptivity on infusion use. The post hoc analysis based on polynomial modeling provided a possible explanation for the unsupported hypothesis, suggesting the nonlinear differences in the underlying influencing mechanisms of instrumental and relational embeddedness on infusion use.

The formation mechanisms of AI infusion use based on material adaptivity and social embeddedness help to develop the business strategies that enable smart objects as social actors to exert a key role in users' daily lives, in turn realizing the social and economic value of AI.

This study advances the theoretical research on material adaptivity, updates the information system (IS) research on infusion use and identifies the bridging role of social embeddedness of smart objects as agentic social actors in the AI context.

This paper focuses on how shared objects created by support departments in a software development firm facilitate the advancement of learning and knowledge sharing. Objects can be both facilitative and restrictive in certain ways, and the study seeks to enhance our understanding of how they can be made more facilitative.

This study can best be described as a single location exploratory case study in which data were predominantly gathered through unstructured interviews. The theoretical perspective of practice‐oriented studies is adopted, specifically utilizing activity theory to understand and analyze objects.

It is pointed out that, striving to understand objects with a focus on their often unanticipated usage can be useful in making them more facilitative. While emphasizing that objects are not used coherently in the field, the study explores how they could be made more facilitative by focusing on situated ways in which they act in the field. It was observed that they could become more facilitative by being shells with higher degrees of configurability, by being legitimate facades that create interesting contexts of multi‐project interactions and by being anchors of stability in an organizational setting of constant flux.

The research is exploratory in nature and has focused on the introduction of new ways of looking at objects in project‐based organizations. An enhanced understanding of the dynamics of objects in project settings can enable project personnel and support service personnel to make them more facilitative. For researchers, this study contributes to the discussions on understanding objects by proposing new ways of looking at the role of objects in project‐based organizations.

Financial information about costs and return on investments are of key importance to strategic decision making but also in the context of process improvement or business engineering. The purpose of this paper is to propose a value‐oriented approach to business process modeling based on key concepts and metrics from operations and financial management, to aid decision making in process re‐design projects on the basis of process models.

The paper suggests a theoretically founded extension to current process modeling approaches, and delineates a framework as well as methodical support to incorporate financial information into process re‐design. The paper uses two case studies to evaluate the suggested approach.

Based on two case studies, the paper shows that the value‐oriented process modeling approach facilitates and improves managerial decision making in the context of process re‐design.

The paper presents design work and two case studies. More research is needed to more thoroughly evaluate the presented approach in a variety of real‐life process modeling settings.

The paper shows how the approach enables decision makers to make investment decisions in process re‐design projects, and also how other decisions, for instance in the context of enterprise architecture design, can be facilitated.

This paper reports on an attempt to integrate financial considerations into the act of process modeling, in order to provide more comprehensive decision‐making support in process re‐design projects.

This paper aims to explore the feasibility of using web‐mining technology on learning object (LO) usage information to discover the LO relation pattern and provide valuable recommendations on related learning resources. Design/methodology/approach – This paper proposes three kinds of learning object relation patterns and gives a specific definition of each pattern based on analysing the learners' usage data stored in the learning object repository. These relation patterns can be used to make effective recommendations to learners.

LO usage data indicate the potential relation patterns between LOs. By using web‐mining technology on the usage data, it is possible to discover valuable relation patterns.

The authors propose a set of LO relation patterns and indicate how they are closely related to users' learning behaviour.

The purpose of this research is to propose an evaluation framework for analyzing learning objects usage, with the aim of extracting useful information for improving the quality of the metadata used to describe the learning objects, but also for personalization purposes, including user models and adaptive itineraries.

The paper presents experimental results from the log usage analysis during one academic semester of two different subjects, 350 students. The experiment examines raw server log data generated from the interactions of the students with the classroom learning objects, in order to find relevant information that can be used to improve the metadata used for describing both the learning objects and the learning process.

Preliminary studies have been carried out in order to obtain an initial picture of the interactions between learners and the virtual campus, including both services and resources usage. These studies try to establish relationships between user profiles and their information and navigational behavior in the virtual campus, with the aim of promoting personalization and improving the understanding of what learning in virtual environments means.

During the formal learning process, students use learning resources from the virtual classroom provided by the academic library, but they also seek information outside the virtual campus. All these usage data are not considered in the model proposed here. Further research is needed in order to obtain a complete view of the seeking information behavior of students for improving the users' profile and creating better personalized services.

This paper suggests how a selection of fields used in the LOM standard could be used for enriching the description of learning objects, automatically in some cases, from the learning objects usage performed by an academic community.

From libraries beginnings, they have been a “quiet storage place”. With the development of digital libraries, they become a meeting place where explicit and implicit recommendations about information sources can be shared among users. Social and learning process interactions, therefore, can be considered another knowledge source.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the factors affecting users’ continuous microblog usage intention. In recent years, the number of microblog users has gradually declined. This research can reveal microblog users’ needs and provide the improvement direction of microblog services.

By integrating Wixom and Todd’s theoretical framework, the Uses and Gratifications Theory and the DeLone and McLean Information System Success Model, a conceptual model is proposed. In this model, gratification is defined as a kind of behavioral attitude, and satisfaction is viewed as an object-based attitude. The survey data were collected online and analyzed using the partial least squares method.

The results suggest that users’ continuance intention (behavioral intention) is jointly determined by users’ gratification (behavioral-based attitude) and their habitual microblog usage behavior. Likewise, gratification is positively affected by satisfaction (object-based attitude) which is a joint function of system quality and information quality (object-based beliefs).

In this research, Wixom and Todd’s principle is applied as the basic theoretical framework; gratification is viewed as a behavior attitude and user satisfaction is identified as an object-based attitude. This research model is a new lens for continuance usage research.

Recognizing daily life activities and human behaviour from contextual information is a challenging task. The purpose of the research work in this paper is to develop a system that can detect indoor and outdoor daily life activities of low entropy mobile people such as elderly people and patients with regular routines using non-intrusive sensor and contextual information.

A framework is proposed that utilises a hierarchical approach in which high-level activities are divided into sub-activities and tasks and recognises the high-level outdoor and indoor activities of daily life. Tasks are recognised at lower level from sensor data and then used by the “activity recogniser” at higher level to recognise the high-level activities. For outdoor activities recognition, wireless proximity data are used, whereas for indoor activities, object usage data obtained through radio frequency identification sensors are used.

For outdoor tasks, results have shown 100 per cent recognition for experiment 1 and a decrease in recognition from 100 to 82.7 per cent, respectively, for experiment 2-9 due to increase in the entropy of individual tasks. Outdoor activity recognition ranges from 84.1 to 100 per cent. For indoor tasks, generating alternative tasks sequences approach effectively recognised the single tasks that were conducted with objects without any order. Average indoor activity recognition rate remains above 90 per cent. The reason why this approach is able to detect the activities without their distinct features is the planning capability of the Asbru that is used in the modelling of high-level activities.

The novelty of this research work is a framework that utilises different types of sensor data and recognises both indoor and outdoor daily life activities of individuals.

Purpose: The present research draws from neomaterialist theories to investigate women’s erotic consumption in Brazil, analyzing several stages of the consumption cycle, from need detection to disposal.

Methodology/Approach: Fieldwork followed the Itinerary Method, with 35 in-depth interviews and participant observation.

Findings: In addition to providing thick description of two consumption cycle stages, the chapter analyzes assemblages of material objects and people that are part of erotic consumption. The dialectical process that transforms consumers through the agency of erotic products also transforms products through repurpose or personification – as lovers, butlers, or party crashers – which, in turn, highlights these objects’ agentic nature. Erotic products are understood as possessing social life and death.

Practical Implications: This research uncovered a series of transformations performed by the object on the consumer (i.e., objectification of the consumer) and vice versa (i.e., personification of the object). These processes help understand tensions inherent to networks and assemblages formed during erotic consumption. They also suggest, along the consumption cycle, unmet consumer needs that may be tended to by industry, like disposal issues.

Social Implications: This study broadly aims at helping women to more freely exercise their sexuality (with the mediation of erotic products if they so desire) in a Latin-American patriarchal society where double moral standards regarding men and women still prevail.

Originality/Value of Chapter: This is one of the first studies conducted within consumer culture theory that focuses specifically on sexuality related consumption.

The purpose of this paper is to present the architectural principles and the services of the D-NET software toolkit. D-NET is a framework where designers and developers find the tools for constructing and operating aggregative infrastructures (systems for aggregating data sources with heterogeneous data models and technologies) in a cost-effective way. Designers and developers can select from a variety of D-NET data management services, can configure them to handle data according to given data models, and can construct autonomic workflows to obtain personalized aggregative infrastructures.

The paper provides a definition of aggregative infrastructures, sketching architecture, and components, as inspired by real-case examples. It then describes the limits of current solutions, which find their lacks in the realization and maintenance costs of such complex software. Finally, it proposes D-NET as an optimal solution for designers and developers willing to realize aggregative infrastructures. The D-NET architecture and services are presented, drawing a parallel with the ones of aggregative infrastructures. Finally, real-cases of D-NET are presented, to show-case the statement above.

The D-NET software toolkit is a general-purpose service-oriented framework where designers can construct customized, robust, scalable, autonomic aggregative infrastructures in a cost-effective way. D-NET is today adopted by several EC projects, national consortia and communities to create customized infrastructures under diverse application domains, and other organizations are enquiring for or are experimenting its adoption. Its customizability and extendibility make D-NET a suitable candidate for creating aggregative infrastructures mediating between different scientific domains and therefore supporting multi-disciplinary research.

D-NET is the first general-purpose framework of this kind. Other solutions are available in the literature but focus on specific use-cases and therefore suffer from the limited re-use in different contexts. Due to its maturity, D-NET can also be used by third-party organizations, not necessarily involved in the software design and maintenance.